So, I was going to sell my 75g a few months ago. I had some interest, maybe it is today's economoy, but the offers I received were far too low for what I have put into the system. Maybe it was some kind of devine intervention/plan but a couple weeks after putting the tank up for sale one of my T5 ballasts crapped out. I was pissed but at least I still had two bulbs lit...or so I thought. 2-3 days later I come home and the other set of T5 bulbs are off. I figure it must be a timer issue or something. I plugged the ballast into a wall outlet and the lights came on for a couple minutes and turned off again. After awhile I figured out my other ballast was also shot. I have no idea what caused both ballasts to go bad, maybe an electrical surge of some sort. For the last 4 months I have been lighting my tank with 1 walmart duel T8 shop light. Yes that would be SPS, LPS, and softies all lit by two 32w bulbs. I did not have the money for awhile to buy lights with Christmas and all so I let it ride until now. So far I have not really lost anything however the corals are slowy fading away and algae rearing its ugly head.
I finally made the move last night after A LOT of research and purchased a 48 Dimmable LED kit w/4- Meanwell 48P drivers, Controller, 2-5.886"x16" heatsinks, couple 120mm fans, 12v power supply, wire, soldering iron etc... The LED kit I purchased from Rapid LED and the heatsinks are from HeatsinkUSA. Fans are from ebay. I choose a color combination with 16 Neutral White XP-G Crees and 32 XT-E Royal Blue Crees. The only difficulty I have run into is driving the lights within the parameters of the maximum voltage of each driver. I want to run them in series but I am not spending more money on drivers. I have come to the conclusion I will put 3 Royal Blues on each of the Neutral White drivers so that I keep to a max of 13 royal blues on a driver. I will make sure to put these royal blues on the back row of each heatsink so it will minimize any kind of spotlighting affect they may have.
Anyway I thought I would share my story with the rest of you. All in all instead of selling and receiving money I spent about $500 on the lighting system. Now I get to have some fun building it!
